I wanted to look up what kind of dogs the vikings had in order to make a historically accurate shitpost meme, but while googling “viking dog”, figuring I’d find pictures of some kind of big cool war dogs or dogs used for hunting moose and bear, but instead I found this
the noble vallhund
herder of cows and biter of ankles
This is literally a viking corgi.
The Pembroke Welsh Corgi developed starting roughly 1,000 years ago from a mix of the 3,000yo breed that was the historical Cardigan Welsh Corgi (first brought to Wales with Celtic groups emigrating from continental Europe), and Spitz type dogs that were brought in with the Viking raids 1,000 years ago.
Corgis are a mix of Viking and Celt, and that’s neat. The vallhund is literally very close family to at least the Pembroke corgi.
There are a number of Scandinavian dog breeds that might be also associated with Vikings, most of which are spitzen. The Norrbottenspetz, Karelian Bear Dog, Finnish Lapphund, Icelandic Shepherd, Finnish Spitz, etc.
Special additional shout out for the Norwegian Lundehund, which was developed to hunt puffins. (Lunde means puffin). They look like a generic medium dog at first.
Except they have secret weapons just for clambering over rocks to get puffins. They have six fully-formed and muscled toes per foot, as well as extreme range of motion in their joints.
If asked to identify the breed of this glorious looking dog, I’d probably admit that I didn’t know, but suspect Jim Henson Creature Shop was involved in some way.
Regardless of how fitting his name is, Ohren, there are occasions where I feel he deserves a different name. He seems to always be observing, always stalking. He will follow me everywhere; looking over my shoulder one moment he’s there, and the next he isn’t, you pan around but you can’t spot him, then you turn back around and suddenly he’s sitting in front of you in your path. He’ll wrap his paws around his nose, and peer over them when in bed with me.
Not gonna lie, he can be a bit spooky. Maybe I should’ve named him Ghost, but it’s too late for that now.
